Final Report
by
Shu-mei Shih, Director
The Center for Comparative and Interdisciplinary Research on Asia
International Institute
University of California, Los Angeles
December 2003
I. Original Proposal
The Center for Comparative and Interdisciplinary Research on Asia (CIRA) at UCLA International Institute received funding for a workshop on Taiwan Studies in order to develop new blueprints for the future directions of Taiwan studies in the humanities and social sciences in the United States with CIRA as the gathering locus for scholars and research projects. The workshop invited a small number of prominent junior and senior scholars already working on or interested in developing research on important issues in Taiwan Studies to discuss, exchange, and project ideas, paradigms, and goals for Taiwan Studies in the future. The workshop took place on Saturday, December 6, 2004 at UCLA. The intellectual argument of the original proposal was as follows:
It is important to situate Taiwan Studies away from the narrow, bipolar analytic of 鏠China-Taiwan relations and to broaden its scope to the international, global context. Although individual scholars in Taiwan and the U.S. have begun to work in this direction, there has not been any concerted, organized effort to develop an intellectual agenda for the future directions of Taiwan Studies in the global context. The importance of this new contextualization is at least three-fold: to avoid falling into the trap of old fashioned real studies? Model from the get-go; to make comparative methodology central to its operation; to enlarge the understanding of Taiwan along multiple axes in light of the rest of the world--Europe, the U.S., Asia, the Middle East, Africa, etc.--thus making Taiwan Studies a global partner in academic exchanges across multiple scholarly communities.
It is imperative to connect contemporary scholarly and critical methodologies in the humanities and social sciences with Taiwan Studies. The old model of Taiwan Studies in the United States has mainly been the study of politics as a Cold War legacy. Other humanistic and social science methodologies have been largely ignored to the detriment of the development of Taiwan Studies. A globally aware and locally sensitive Taiwan Studies will employ comparative and interdisciplinary methodologies to enhance the dissemination of the knowledge of Taiwan history, culture, and society. To bring Taiwan Studies to the awareness of global partners in scholarship, the most expedient method is undoubtedly to speak to the top levels of scholars working in fields other than Asian Studies. This means that the work needs to include scholars who are not associated with Taiwan directly but with sympathy and critical interest in Taiwan. The network of scholars will need to be inclusive of non-Taiwan specialists in the future.
The workshop was built upon a conference that CIRA organized in October 2000 entitled Remapping Taiwan: Histories and Cultures in the Context of Globalization? The Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation of International Scholarly Exchange sponsored that conference with co-sponsorship from the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office Cultural Division. It was an international conference involving 46 speakers and about 100 audience members, and was a tremendous success (please see attachment) The selected results of the conference have been published in the special issue that the director of CIRA, Shu-mei Shih, has edited for the summer 2003 issue of Postcolonial Studies (accessible in print and on line at; http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/online/1368-8790.html). Although the conference was enormously successful, there was a compellingly felt need that a paradigm-setting and brainstorming workshop is necessary to devise a future blueprint for Taiwan Studies in order to bring Taiwan Studies to a much more international arena.
II. The Workshop, Audience, and Schedule
The workshop was held on December 6 at UCLA as planned. Altogether 10 scholars were invited from various universities on the west coast, with only one scholar coming from Duke University. This was partly out of funding considerations, but also partly due to the fact that the most exciting, vibrant scholarship in Asian Studies has really been mainly happening on the west coast. About 60 people showed up during the workshop as audiences, and they all more or less stayed through the entire day. Almost all the graduate students in the Southern California region with interest in Taiwan Studies traveled to UCLA for this event. Audience members came from as far as Riverside, Irvine, San Diego, and Santa Barbara. For a scholarly conference, this workshop is the most successful that CIRA has ever run. The discussion was vibrant, the atmosphere was exciting, and the content of intellectual exchange was sophisticated.
Workshop Schedule
9:15 am Introduction
Shu-mei Shih, CIRA director
9:30 am Panel 1: Moderated by Shu-mei Shih
-12:00 pm
Leo Ching, History, University of Oregon, Eugene
Tze-lan Sang, Asian Languages and Literatures, University of
Oregon, Eugene
Chris Connery, Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz
Jeffrey Hou, Landscape Architecture, University of Washington, Seattle
12pm-1pm Lunch Break
1pm-3pm Panel 2: Moderated by Leo Ching
Rob Wilson, Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz
Daphne Lei, Drama, University of California, Irvine
Chunchi Wang, Film Studies, University of Southern California
3 pm-3: 15 pm Coffee Break
3:15 pm-
4:45pm Panel 3: Moderated by Chris Connery
Hui-shu Lee, Art History, University of California, Los Angeles
Ming-cheng Lo, Sociology, University of California, Davis
Ta-wei Chi, Comparative Literature, University of California, Los Angeles
4:45pm-5: 30pm Op discussion with all panelists, community representatives, and the audience moderated by Shui-chin Chang (Director, Cultural Division, TECO) and Concluding remarks by Shu-mei Shih
5:30 Reception
III. Panel Presentations
The workshop was divided into three panels as the schedule above shows. The day began with the introductory remarks by Professor Shu-mei Shih, CIRA director. Shih laid out the plans for the day, the shortfalls in current studies of Taiwan Studies in the United States, and the possible futures for a complex and multiplex understanding of Taiwan as an object of scholarly inquiry. The introductory remarks are attached here for reference.
Professor Leo Ching (Associate Professor of Asian and African Languages and Literatures, Duke University) proposed the notion of Taiwan as Method? Coining the term from Takeuchi Yoshimisia as Method? Ching argues for inverting the object and the method, so that the object becomes the method. What this means is that we will be able to ask broader questions about Taiwan and infer from these questions to questions about other locations. How does the study of Taiwan change our understanding of knowledge and ways of understanding the world at large? Taiwan thus becomes not just an area to be studied, but becomes a means to expose the limits of hegemonic knowledge and enable a more complex reflection on changing global conditions.
Professor Chris Connery (Professor of Chinese Literature and Cultural Studies) called for the reorganization of knowledge in the post-Cold War context, and proposed a rethinking of area studies in a dialectical model. In this dialectical model, area studies are no longer tied to government funding and the logic of capitalist modernity (capitalogic)? but can assert a new model beyond capitalism. Examples that are similar in scope and situation to Taiwan studies include Filippino Studies (the study of alternative ideologies, diaspora, and cultural nationalism, for instance), Sikh studies, Tamil studies, and Vietnamese Studies. Like Ching, Connery also suggests the importance of resituating Taiwan knowledge as universally reference-able, so that the location of knowledge is no longer just the object. It is not so much size that matters, but the quality of thought. So the smallness of Taiwan is not an issue in terms of scholarly work. Taiwan nationalism could be pochalist?(oriented towards the future) rather than essentialist?(Defined by past traditions) and thus open up all kinds of possibilities.
Professor Hui-shu Lee (Assistant Professor, Art History, University of California, Los Angeles) discussed the politics of traveling national treasures of the Palace Museum in terms of the repositioning of Chinese treasures for Taiwan consciousness. The naming of treasures as from 鏠hina?Rather than as native, the naming of the new branch museum in Chia-yi as the Asian Art Museum, all show the importance to nativize the museum culture in Taiwan. Two areas of collections will be expanded in the future: the art of Taiwan and art of Asia and the world.
Professor Jeffrey Hou (Assistant Professor of the Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Washington) discussed the importance of organization for supporting Taiwan Studies, and talked about the difficulty of organization as falling on four areas. Cross-strait politics influences all levels of scholarship and organization; scholars are dispersed in many places; financial support is lacking; and the nature of scholarship needs to be broadening to be more comparative in the mode of Pacific Rim studies. For strategies, he proposed that we should continue to do what we do best and nurture current and future associations of Taiwan studies, including European Association of Taiwan Studies (recently established in the U.K.).
Professor Rob Wilson (Professor of English and Director of Asia Pacific Alliance of Scholars, University of California, Santa Cruz) discussed Taiwan Studies in the Asia Pacific frame to signify a kind of borderless regionality that is characterized by multiplicity, fluidity, and the mixture of cultures and languages. He proposed a poetics of mongrelization that examines not just the dialectics but also the trialectics (triangulated globality of an island space between Japan, China, and the U.S.) of culture with the capacity to be inclusive and inventive. Taiwan can be regarded as the vangarde of this poetics. As the contact zone of cultures, so that one can theorize questions of culture, society, language that are not national in nature, and one can study the sub genres (not big frames) in minor keys in the moment of emergence, and that Taiwan becomes the paradigm for studying polyculturalism (before cultures are named), not multiculturalism.
Professor Daphne Lei (Assistant Professor of Theatre, University of California, Irvine) discussed the waning of the traditional Chinese theatre in Taiwan due to competition from China and the important emergence of modern theatre with Sino phone cultural traits, especially in the theatre group Contemporary Legend led by Wu Hsing-kuo. The group mixes Shakespearean theatre with the Peking Opera for stunning aesthetic effects. There may be failed translations, collisions and confrontations, but also interesting interactions. The question is whether this formula is a trap or is an enabling one.
Graduate student Chunchi Wang (ABD, Film and Television, University of Southern California) discussed the limits of national cinema and Third Cinema paradigm in the study of recent Taiwan films that are global or cosmopolitan in character. She discussed especially the film 岞millennium Mambo?by Hou Hsiao-hsien and 𨯗 One and a One?By Edward Yang where the East/West binary is no longer tenable, where there is no cultural specificity, and the directors are members of the international cinema culture. She emphasized the imperative of going beyond the national frame in the study of Taiwan cinema.
Professor Tze-lan Sang (Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures, University of Oregon, Eugene) discussed the importance of maintaining cultural openness in Taiwan as opposed to cultural chauvanism or policing that sometimes happens. This is important so that the cultural does not become collapsed into the political and the territorial, and does not become narrowly nativist, but leaves out open possibilities for future developments.
Professor Ming-cheng M. Lo (Associate Professor of Sociology, University of California, Davis) discussed how her work on Taiwan doctors during the colonial period, in the book Doctors Without Borders has helped her in the study of other sites and localities. In other words, she has developed methodologies and intellectual sensitivity to certain issues (such as the question of professionalization in the context of colonialism) that she can apply to other studies due to her research on Taiwan. Taiwan is therefore a method as well as object of study. The study of Taiwan informs the study of other places, and allows one to ask the question, 蘔ow do we study cases on the receiving ends of the violence of modernity?? She therefore posed four questions for future Taiwan studies. How does the study of Taiwan raise unique theoretical questions that have not been raised before? How can we situate Taiwan with other former colonies of Japan, namely Taiwan and Korea? How do we theorize Taiwan𠏋 marginality in terms of other margins of China, such as Hong Kong and Tibet? How do we compare Taiwan to other late comers of modernity?
Ta-wei Chi (graduate student, Department of Comparative Literature, UCLA) discussed how sexuality is mediated nationally, transnationally, regionally, and inter-regionally in the Taiwan context. Taiwan as a nation wishing to be recognized in the international context parallels sexual minorities?desire to be recognized, hence we see the Taiwan government𠏋 deployment of queer discourse to gain international recognition for Taiwan.
IV: Conclusion
The panel presentations and discussions with the audience in the workshop can be summed up as having developed a tripartite model of Taiwan studies.
The vertical model of Taiwan as method: Studying Taiwan as a locality can become the resource for universal knowledge. Research methods and results developed from Taiwan Studies can be applied to the study of other areas, and thus become the content of a new theory or theories.
The horizontal model of comparative studies: Taiwan studies needs to be situated in relation to other studies of other places and cultures to avoid narrow nationalist and nativist frames, and to broaden the scope of Taiwan studies.
The importance of internal critique: Studying Taiwan also means being attentive to its internal hierarchies, oppressions, and inequities embedded in Taiwan history, culture, and society.
V: Future Goals
If sufficient funding can be procured, CIRA would propose the following future goals for Taiwan Studies at UCLA:
International lecture series cutting into practice the intellectual conclusions made at the workshop and to continue to encourage and produce solid scholarly work.
Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies o provide prestige to Taiwan Studies by endowing a chair professorship.
Fellowships o provide funding for graduate students who main area of research is Taiwan.
Respectfully Submitted by:
Shu-mei Shih
Director, Center for Comparative and Interdisciplinary Research on Asia
UCLA International Institute
11th Floor, Bunche Hall
UCLA
Los Angeles, CA 90095
Work Phones: (310) 825-0007; (310) 794-8944
e-mail: Shih@humnet.ucla.edu
website: http://www.international.ucla.edu/cira/
Introductory Remarks by Shu-Mei Shih
December 6, 2003
In my
capacity as director of the Center for Comparative and Interdisciplinary
Research on Asia at UCLA’s International Institute, I'd like to welcome all of
you to this workshop. This workshop, as the conference poster shows, is a
follow-up to the 2000 conference entitled “Remapping Taiwan: Society and
Culture in the Context of Globalization.”
That conference was a preliminary mapping of Taiwan and globalization
dynamic on the one hand, and a mapping of current state of Taiwan studies in
the United States on the other.
The conference was three days long, brought together over 40 scholars
from across the U.S. and Taiwan, and we covered a broad range of topics. Select papers from the conference are
recently published in this year’s summer issue of Postcolonial Studies, a non-area studies journal that circulates
among scholars in many different fields.
Today’s workshop builds upon the mapping
of Taiwan studies in that conference to take on a more visionary or
future-oriented role in the form of brainstorming what Taiwan studies holds in
the future. For this purpose, the
presentations today are informal, and a lot of time is allotted for discussion,
question and answer. I am hoping
for an open forum where scholarly issues are debated without political agendas
to collectively help move towards a multiplex vision of Taiwan studies.
Let
me begin my short introduction by way of the two images chosen for the workshop
poster. The two images in the
poster, the first one by Huang Chin-ho, was the 2000 conference poster; the
second image is the cover image I chose for the special issue of Postcolonial Studies, an installation art
by Wu Ma-li. If anything, these
images speak eloquently about Taiwan as a simultaneously global and a local
place.
Huang
Chin-ho’s oil painting articulates something quintessential about Taiwan in
brilliant colors and shocking images. I wrote in the introduction to Postcolonial Studies about this painting
this way in terms of Taiwan as a periphery to the West in the scheme of
globalization and how the periphery has little time to ponder whether
globalization is good for them or not:
The
painting by Huang Chin-ho. . . Evokes that sense of haphazardness,
disorganization, hybridity, and fragmentation pulsating with intense, nameless
energy. If the painting depicts
anything at all, it is not the plentitude of time either as duration or as
quality. Taipei is not a city for
the Benjaminian flâneur of the late nineteenth century Paris who goes
“botanizing on the asphalt,” taking the turtle for a walk and leisurely gazing
at the store displays.[i] Instead, we have transgender and
deformed bodies, shocking colors, disproportionately large vegetation alive
with an unidentifiable energy, sharp-angled hyper-modern buildings ready to
take off like rockets into the sky: dynamic, carnivalesque, apocalyptic. One must react to forces in life
quickly, whether as a form of violation or as a form of celebration; there is
no time to slow down, no time to find conjuncture, harmony, complementarity,
and coherence.
On
the other hand, we have Wu Mali, whose installation art “The Library” depicts a
different sense of time and space:
“The Library” . . . was first exhibited at the Venice
Biennial of 1995, the same year that artist Huang Chin-ho’s works were also
shown there. If, as mentioned above,
Huang Chin-ho offers a set of wild carnivalesque images in the allegorizing of
Taiwan, this particular work is quiet, silent, somber, and orderly. Two sets of three bookshelves line the
two walls on each side of a large window.
Rows of books are placed on these metal shelves, and in the middle is a
table with a glass bottle filled with shreds of paper. Upon closer inspection,
these books bearing all kinds of classic titles turn out to be clear acrylic
boxes filled with shreds of paper.
The books include the Bible, Buddhist sutras, Confucian texts, Greek
mythology, Nobel-prize winning works of literature, and so on, and they are all
shredded to pieces stuffing the acrylic boxes lining the shelves as well as the
glass jar on the table in the middle of the installation. While the shredded books make a clearly
critical commentary on canonical culture and literature, they also stand
autonomously as objects d’art emerging from the destruction of classics. By debunking classics from various
parts of the world, the reified culturalisms that
these classics represent are literally dissolved into shreds of paper, which
are material embodiments of a new global culture of in authenticity
Instead of carnivalesque disquietitude, here we have a confident and quiet cosmopolitanism, which sees any and all global culture as a resource to be remolded, debunked, and transformed into a useable culture that thrives on inauthenticity.
If we examine these two art works more closely in light of the study of Taiwan as we know it in the United States, we will notice that very little about Taiwan culture and society is really written about these days. A quick search on UCLA library’s Orion 2 catalogue will show how the Cold War paradigm seems to continue to dominate, and Taiwan appears largely as a political text before it is a cultural, historical, and social text. If you type in “Taiwan Politics” you will get 428 entries of books ever published in English; but if you type in Taiwan culture, you get 13 (which also includes history); 4 for Taiwan society, and 10 for Taiwan literature, and only 2 for Taiwan economy. It is not surprising that Taiwan Politics dominates U.S. perception of Taiwan, considering the strategic importance of Taiwan’s geopolitics against communism during the Cold War years. The low numbers in Taiwan culture, society, history and literature are predictable given the Cold War imperative, but what is most surprising is how so little research has been done on Taiwan economy. Considering that Taiwan is one of the largest economies in the world, I think the 10th by last count, and considering all the Four Little Dragons discourse in the East Asian Economic Miracle narrative, it is really astounding. I find it hard to understand but to conjecture that economic issues must be largely subsumed under political discourse in the form of political economy. The familiar contemporary narratives are about economic competition between Taiwan and China, about how Taiwan factors in China’s march to capitalism, etc.
The predominance of the political narrative is, I think, another sign of Taiwan’s perceived unimportance or insignificance otherwise. I have given an ironic title to the special issue of Postcolonial Studies that I edited, calling it “Globalization and Taiwan’s (In) significance.” The jab is on the presumed smallness of Taiwan, the lack of a paradigm for studying island civilizations, and Taiwan’s difficulty in garnering international attention and support. I have often felt it necessary to deploy irony as a rhetorical strategy in talking about Taiwan, which is of course a familiar story for scholars working on minor cultures and societies, or writers dealing with their minoritized conditions. Irony being a double-voiced discourse allows for both the deconstruction and construction of codes of meaning and value at the same time.
As scholars, how do we make sense of Taiwan society, culture, and history broadly and comparatively and how do we make it make sense? What are the possibilities and impossibilities of comparative studies of Taiwan? Many scholars have studied Taiwan-U.S. relations in politics, but what about culture and the arts? What about Taiwan-Africa axes, especially South Africa? What about Taiwan-Europe axes in all their multiplicities of sites of meaning and relationships?
This workshop is meant to be a brainstorming session for the panelists to work through a set of questions particular to their individual research on Taiwan and related issues as a means to conceptualize blueprints for Taiwan Studies in the United States. In that spirit, I invite the audience to participate in the discussions after the presentations of the panelists. Thank you.